comment #341
OPERATOR RULING 2026-09-24: instance state never gates a delivery window
RULED. `--active-only` becomes `--busy-only` (#256) and is PURELY activity-axis; the rest-state AND is deleted; any instance-axis hold must be re-proposed as its own flag on its own axis. Authority is the operator, who oversees every adapter currently built on spt and states the intent was always "deliver only while the agent is busy", with no intention of excluding deliveries to uncontrolled endpoints. No grill: that was the design question a grill would have asked.

SCOPE WIDENED, and my earlier scoping was wrong. The hold is not only in the public docs - it is stated in CONTEXT.md itself, the authoritative design source, as the "deferred-message gate" clause: deferred messages are not delivered to a dormant or suspended instance. That clause contradicts the rest of CONTEXT.md's own model and is where this defect starts. Amendment set: that clause, messaging/overview.md's delivery-window bullet, instances/overview.md's rest-states bullet, the two gate sites, and #256's rename (with `--active-only` kept as a hidden deprecated alias).

VOCABULARY CLARIFIED, NO RENAME. `dormant` has TWO arms - the driver detached, OR a sibling instance took attention - and they are nowhere written side by side, which is why dormant gets read as suspended. `suspended` is COLD: the harness session is closed, resumed on wake, node still up and still gossiping, fully addressable via wake. It has nothing to do with siblings: a lone instance with no sibling anywhere reaches it through `endpoint shutdown` or opt-in auto-suspend. The docs gain one sentence naming both dormant arms, and one saying instance state selects WHICH INSTANCE a bare id resolves to (and may require a wake first) but never which messages are delivered when. The four names stay - renaming churns registry status, CLI, picker, the subnet wire and every adapter's docs to buy the same clarity a paragraph buys.

(a), the away notice, needs no separate fix: it falls out once the AND is gone.